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The Influence Of Technology
How Has Technology and Science Affected the ''' '''Postmodern World we Live in Today? To answer this question, the essay will start by looking back to the industrial revolution, looking at Walter Benjamin and Clement Greenburg who described their opinions of the art at the time of the industrial revolution. Through time and technology art grew, and evolved. Pop Art was considered to be the precursor to postmodernism, by looking at a number of modern theorist’s opinions of the present movement, and how the relationship between technology, art and consumerism affect each other. Finally adding to the debate with the history and views of art theorists leading up to today and attempt to answer the question – How has technology and science affected the postmodern world we live in today? Here is a quote from Bertrand Russell who was a philosopher in language who once said “When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum which could be lifted off. I found that the clock went very much faster without the pendulum. If the main purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing it’s pendulum. True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach oneself to be indifferent to the passage of time. The linguistic philosophy, which cares only about language, and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace.” [1] Capitalism and consumerism were expanding fast through technological breakthroughs. Art was no longer for the privileged few. Through increasing demand for art, some theorists considered the standard of popular art to be very kitsch as more people were selling art and less time was spent producing it. Clement Greenberg’s essay Kitsch and Avant- Garde compares the two forms of art as being high and low forms, kitsch being the lower form. Here is a quotation from the essay “To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, Kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide”[2]. Later in the essay he then goes on to compare the two movements “The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch. In the second place, neither in backward Russia nor in the advanced West do the masses prefer kitsch simply because their governments condition them to it. Where state education systems take the trouble to mention art, we are told to respect the old masters, not kitsch; and yet we go and hang Maxfield Parrish or his equivalent on our walls” 2 Walter Benjamin’s essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” describes the effects of the industrial revolution on art with the invention of print and photography. Artist’s work could be mass produced for the first time “When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. The resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century,” [3] No longer was art exclusive to the privileged few, anyone could now view and own prints of the artist’s work, through this happening artists work became more famous and a part of everyday life. Walter Benjamin describes how this effects the perception of art forever, he describes the original piece losing its aura through the image being mass produced, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be”3. Through the invention of print peoples attitude and perception of art had changed forever, because the original had lost its uniqueness as so far as the place, and accuracy of where the work was created. Through technology art changed again with the invention of film. Techniques were available to view images that were not normally visible to the eye like slow motion for instance. In the 1950’s T.V became mainstream in people’s homes, affecting their lifestyle and life choices both of products and consumerism in the expanding capitalist landscape that they lived in. In consequence to this people became more informed of science technology, culture and politics worldwide. In Britain people looked to America for the glamour and escapism from the recent austerity after the Second World War. Over time more and more methods and mediums of creating art have evolved through technological breakthroughs for example silk screen printing. Probably the best known artist using this method was Andy Warhol who was one of the Pop Art giants of the movement, which started in the mid 1950’s. Warhol’s prints reflected the capitalistic world which people were living in through images of everyday life an example being the Campbell’s tin soup collection, right the way through to images of glamorous stars such as Marilyn Monroe which were considered popular culture.” Warhol turned mechanical reproduction itself into art by transferring a photo image to a silkscreen which is laid onto the canvas and inked from the back. The only slight “human” touch in this Andycraft is an overlay of crudely applied synthetic colour.”[4] Through using the technique of silkscreen printing Warhol boasted he and his team of printers could produce up to a hundred prints a day, it was becoming more and more evident that art was consumerism and consumerism was art. A lot of the big artists of that time were actually from a design advertising background and this is noticeable in their work, again confirming how evident the relationship between consumerism and art had now become. The growth in capitalism at this time was immense, people had recovered after the austerity of the 2nd world war, and there was now a new consumer, the teenager. Pop art appealed to the majority, but especially the young. Album covers were being designed by artists, Peter Blake designed “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for the Beetles which is probably one of the most famous album covers of all time. Looking back on this movement it is hardly surprising the relationship between art and advertising are so closely linked. Pop art appealed to the masses using advertising techniques such as bright garish colours to attract the eye, as well as using popular culture which the viewer/consumer can identify with. It would have been interesting to learn what Walter Benjamin views on Andy Warhol would have been and whether he thought a silk screen possesses an aura. Pop art is considered by many to be the precursor of Postmodernism. The movements modernism and postmodernism are understood to be cultural projects with a set of perspectives. Modernism was primarily concerned with the principles concerning identity, authority, unity and certainty whereas postmodernism is commonly associated with difference, puralality, textuality, and scepticism. Postmodernism has influenced many genres of today’s life such as literacy, linguistics, sociology, visual arts, music and of course architecture. Now moving direction and looking at theorists opinions of postmodernism, looking at their views of the movement and how technological breakthroughs have affected the world we live in today. Some claim, as far as architecture is concerned, the precise date of the inauguration of postmodernism was 3:32pm on the 15th of July in 1972, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis, Missouri was dynamited. This complex, designed for low income people, which was originally a prize winning design when built, was now considered uninhabitable.” According to Charles Jenicks, this proclaimed the death of the international style of modernist architecture, the end of buildings as “ machine for living” envisioned for us by Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Le Corbusier and other abstract functionalists.” .”[5] the book then goes on to explain what postmodern architecture has to offer in place of modernism “ This means a return to ornament, with reference to the historic past and its symbolism, but in the ironic manner of parody, pastiche and quotation.” [6] It was becoming evident that people no longer could live in this ideological Marxist manner; people yearned for aesthetic beauty as opposed to the impersonal functionality. Through global advances in technology and communication the eastern bloc (Russia, Germany, and Poland) people were more aware of what capitalism had to offer and were dissatisfied with their way of life. The Russian leadership introduced market reforms allowing a free market economy to flourish which brought about the end of the cold war in late1980’s, which had been predicted by western leaders and new right postmoderns. If it was not for technological breakthroughs in globalisation the demand for commodity by the consumer, the fall of communism may not have occurred when it did, and capitalism may not be as evident as it is today. Jean Baudrillard was a French social theorist who describes the difference between communism and capitalism.”...he argues, everything in primitive society is based upon the principle of continuous symbolic exchange, which maintain social stability and reciprocal relations between man and nature by never allowing the process of exchange to be blocked, cornered or constrained to produce profit [7] indeed, what identifies “symbolic exchange” for Baudrillard is the necessary principle of pure loss in it, the arbitrary and spontaneous expenditure or discharge of goods or utterances without expectation of equivalence or profit. This is opposed to conditions under capitalism which every apparent disposal or giving away of value is really only a detour on the way to a greater accumulation of value or profit.” In 1984 Frederic Jameson contributed to the postmodern debate by writing” The key that connects the leading features of postmodern society – among others, the acceleration of cycles of style and fashion, the increased power of advertising and the electronic media, the advent of universal standardisation, neocolonialism, the green revolution – to the schizoid pastiche of postmodernist culture is the fading of a sense of history. Our contemporary social system has lost its capacity to know its own past, has begun to live in “a perpetual present” without depth definition, or secure identity [8] Steve Connor took the view “The problem for Jameson under these circumstances is how to remain true to the analysis of post modernity he has produced, while yet preventing the enormity of the analysis from overwhelming the possibility of critique. Far from simply bemoaning the loss of the long perspective of history, considered a s inexorable progress or, on the other hand, simply accepting the demise of this perspective ( Jameson is routinely accused of both these things) he is concerned above all with the problem of how to go about analysing a situation which resists analysis so slyly.” [9] It is clear to see that Jameson has struggled with the concept of time in postmodernism; His more recent work resembles Jean Francois Lyotards concern with the same question. Specifically this covers the attempt to read the end of history historically. Jean- Francois Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist who was probably best known in Britain for his articulation of postmodernism and the analysis of the impact of post modernity on the human condition.” Lyotard is infuriatingly vague about what he takes the cause of decline of metanarratives to be, suggesting, only that it has something to do with the renewal of the spirit of capitalism free enterprise with the slow discrediting of its state communist alternative, along with the growth of techniques and technologies in science, with a consequent shift in emphasis from ends to means” [10] Lyotard originally wrote this 1979 but seem more pertinent now since the end of the cold war and birth of the internet.” Lyotard sees this process as fundamentally aimed at cancelling the effects of temporal uncertainty. Knowledge, like money, aims to neutralize the effects of the unexpected, to take account of the future before it happens. The aim of maximal information is “to subordinate the present to what is (still) called the “future”, since in these conditions, the “future” will be completely predetermined and the present itself will cease opening onto an uncertain and contingent afterward” [11] It is clear to see why Lyotard has looked to the future in the discussion of post modernity, because by definition post modernity is the “after modern”, modern means now, so how can the after modern process be a history because it has not happened yet, which is the concept Jameson struggled to critique. Computers have been used to coordinate information between multiple locations since the 1950’s. The US military’s SAGE system was the first large scale example. Computers became a house hold commodity during the 1980’s but mostly as standalone devices; the 1990’s saw the birth of the internet and the spread of the World Wide Web. This lead to instant access to consumerism, information, culture, past present and future, which is believed by many to be the largest technological breakthrough of the late 20th century. The consumer is now saturated with information, not only this but advances in graphics have changed our perspectives and execution on design, architecture and art. We now have a mass communication network where people no longer communicate how nature intended, through emails, chat rooms, Facebook and Twitter. Not only are these technologies evident in computers, but in a whole range of media devices as well as mobile phones. Technology has worked to make people’s lives easier, for instance if you were communicating via email to someone in a foreign language, there are now programs that will translate your text as you are typing into the preferred language. Jean Francois Lyotard debates the issues of linguistics and confronts a metanarrative myth which was the” speculative unity of all Knowledge” which derived from G.W.F Hegal (1770-1831) who was a romantic philosopher of idealistic metaphysics. In this debate Lyotard looks at the ideology of there being one language worldwide. “The classical conception of pragmatics of scientific knowledge’ (pg, 23), as he puts it, requires a rather different structure of authorization. Depending as it does on assigned and agreed truth-value, scientific knowledge and language are set apart from the uses of language which form social bonds. Its dominating ‘language game’ as Lyotard puts it, borrowing a term from the work of Wittgenstein, is denotative rather than narrative. Scientific language is actively opposed to the language-game of narrative, which it associates with ignorance, barbarity, prejudice, superstition and ideology” [12] ” With today’s technology you can actually use your computer or mobile phone as a Dictaphone which will then record and turn your recorded words into text, as mentioned earlier there are now translators, imagine when these technologies are fine tuned, people will be able to talk to one another whatever language they speak. Maybe this could be one of the next new global phenomena’s; however one of Lyotard's concerns with the technology of cyberspace was ‘information processing which quantifies knowledge according to computer logic’. In today’s society we are saturated with endless amounts of information, since the late part of the twentieth century there have been further developments on television with cable and satellite broadcasting opening up a wide range of channels to choose from. With the invention of the remote control millions of people spend their evening flicking from one channel to the next not actually watching anything at all. It’s almost this greed of information that could be our own demise. The information we are fed through television, like the news, is laced with propaganda, advertisements claiming their product will change your life or lead you to that idea through subconscious imagery. These of course, have been happening long before the late part of the twentieth century, but somehow with the wealth of technology seem more apparent. The internet for instance, it’s a minefield of information, but you still, have to have a strong degree of intelligence and knowledge to discern if the information you are receiving is true or not. “The destruction of the past is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.” [13] Through the strong relation between art and design, people recognise emblems and logo’s throughout the world, take the McDonald’s logo for instance. If you look back to prehistoric man they used cave painting to bridge the language barrier by drawing images of available food in the area, thus providing information understood by the masses just as today, with global market advertising. Art is as important today for providing information as it has ever been.”The media have substituted themselves for the older world. Even if we should wish to recover that older world we can do it only by an intensive study of the ways in which the media have swallowed it. [14] Postmodern art has embraced technology and is often used in installations such as bricolage which is the use of words to provoke contemplation, often using electronics to present the work digitally. Multimedia is often used in a number of ways; film is still used frequently as well as sound, computer graphics etc. However with all these technologies incorporated into art, it is apparent people have also embraced more traditional methods and themes, which was often been rejected in modernism'. ' Here is a postmodern artist Mike Kelly being asked... “In the last decade, when so many artists relied on image and image-making procedures borrowed from mass media culture, why have you so persistently embraced the aesthetics of the handmade? MK: I’m of the generation of artists, for whom there was an extreme reaction against the handmade and clinched ideas of self -expression, including the notion that the handmade art object revealed a personal, expressive psychology. I still think there is every reason to rebel against that idea, but I also think that to fixate on corporate modes of image- making and on mass-produced imagery is wrong headed, because it is really easy for that style to become overly classical, despite the rhetoric of populism surrounding it” [15] . Here is an artist who graduated in 1977 who would have grown up observing pop art and has decided to move a way to more traditional methods. The point being that people will always go back and look at the great traditional artist’s, technology used in art with mass produced imagery has been used for a number of years to represent the world we live in, however how can we use machine to represent human emotion? Visually this is possible through reproducing an image, but what about the unconscious psyche, to explain a feeling that cannot be shown from merely reproducing an image. In conclusion, technology has enriched people’s lives in so many different ways transportation, medication, education being just a few'''; '''this essay merely describes a small part but an important part nevertheless. Through whatever technologies that have come about there will always be a down side, look at today with the global phenomena of the internet, terrorist organisations are now using this media as a way to cause tension toward western civilization. A large percentage of the military defence is being spent on combating these attempts. Technology can be used for good and bad depending on whose hand the technology rests in; to everything there is an up and a down side depending on the person’s perception and situation. We are living in a postmodern limbo where people are unsure where this movement can go, as postmodern is the after modern what can follow? Possibly a renaissance, but anything truly original is hard to imagine even with such dramatic technological breakthroughs. Techniques and concepts evolve but whatever changes have been or may occur people still hark back to traditional values. By John Lister ---- [1] Gellner (1986, p15) [2] Avant-Garde and Kitsch by Clement Greenberg [3] Walter Benjamin – The work of art in the age of the mechanical reproduction [4] Richard Appignanesi & Chris Garratt (2003 p. 39) [5] Richard Appignanesi & Chris Garratt (2003 p. 115) [6] Richard Appignanesi & Chris Garratt (2003 p. 116) [7] Poster (1975 p. 82-83) [8] Connor (1997 p. 44) [9] Connor (1997 p. 47) [10] Connor (1997 p. 27) [11] Connor (1997 p. 41-42 [12] Connor (1997 p. 25) [13] Hobsbawm (1994 p.56) [14] Mcluhan (2007 P151) [15] Anthology Edited by Harrison and Wood (2003 p. 1100)